Samuel Bak

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Samuel Bak is an artist and a Holocaust survivor.

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[edit] Childhood

Born in 1933 in Vilna, Poland, which is now Vilnius, Lithuania, Bak was recognized from an early age as possessing extraordinary artistic talent. He describes his family as "secular, but proud of their Jewish identity." As Vilna came under German occupation in 1940, Bak and his family moved into the Vilna Ghetto. At the age of nine, he had his first exhibition of painting in the ghetto. Bak escaped the destruction of Vilna by seeking refuge in a Benedictine convent. He and his mother spent most of their time there in an attic.

At the end of the war, his mother and he were the only members of his extensive family still alive. His father Jonas was shot by the Germans in July 1944, only a few days before Bak's liberation. As he described the situation, "when in 1944 the Soviets liberated us, we were two among two hundred of Vilna's survivors--from a community that had counted 70 or 80 thousand." From 1945 to 1948, he and his mother lived in Displaced Persons camps in Germany. He spent most of this period at the Landsberg am Lech DP camp in Germany. It was there he painted a self-portrait shortly before repudiating his Bar Mitzvah ceremony. Bak also studied painting in Munich during this period, and painted "A Mother and Son," 1947, which evokes some of his dark memories of the Holocaust and escape from Soviet occupied Poland.

In 1948, he and his mother emigrated to Israel, and four years later he studied art at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, in Jerusalem. Bak spent most of his time in Israel studying and living in a modest flat in Tel Aviv and did not paint very much during that period. [1]

[edit] Career

From 1953 to 1956, he served in the Israel Defense Forces. Later from 1956 to 1959, he lived in Paris and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1956, he received the first prize of the American-Israeli Cultural Foundation. He then lived in the following places:

  • Rome: 1959-1966
  • Israel: 1966-1974
  • New York: 1974-1977
  • Israel: 1977-1980
  • France: 1980-1984
  • Switzerland: 1984-1993
  • Weston, Massachusetts: 1993-present
  • Received the Herkomer Cultural Prize, Landsberg, Germany
  • Returns to Vilna: 2002, 2003, 2004[2]

[edit] Style & influences

While Bak's work is complex and difficult to characterize, a few themes stand out:

  • In Childhood Memories, 1975, the pear, possibly the fruit of knowledge, evokes the loss of paradise and discovery of war. Pear trees are also ubiquitous in many of the areas of Europe where he grew up, especially Vilna.
  • The possibility of repair, the repair of a broken world, the tikkun haolam, is an important meaning contained in many of his still life works.
  • Bak's childhood frustration with the story of Genesis, and his admiration for the genius of Michelangelo, blend in his post-Holocaust visiting of this theme.
  • Another artist whose influence is readily seen in his works, such as Angel of the Travelers, 1987, is Albrecht Dürer.
  • Still lifes--in times in which life is never still, never sufficiently protected, nor granted to everyone--attracted him as metaphors full of symbolic implications.
  • Chess as a theme of life has always fascinated Bak. In the DP camps and in Israel, he often played chess with his stepfather Markusha. Underground II, 1997, portrays chess pieces in a sunken, subterranean evocation of the Vilna ghetto.
  • A solitary boy can also be seen in his works. The boy represents his murdered childhood friend, Samek Epstein, and the memory of himself as a child during the Shoah.

[edit] Current status

In 1993, he moved to Weston, Massachusetts, United States, and published Painted in Words: A Memoir, ISBN 0-253-34048-9, in 2001. Now 73, Bak has spent his life dealing with the artistic expression of the destruction and dehumanization which make up his childhood memories. He speaks about what are deemed to be the unspeakable atrocities of the Holocaust, though he has hesitated to limit the boundaries of his art to the post-Holocaust genre. He created a visual language to remind the world of its most desperate moments. Many of his works are on permanent display at Pucker Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts and there was a special exhibition of his recent works in October and November 2006.

[edit] Selected collections

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ Samuel Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir,(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2002), ISBN 0-253-34048-9.
  2. ^ Samuel Bak, Eva Atlan, Peter Junk, Samuel Bak: Life Thereafter, (Osnabruck, Germany: Felix-Nussbaum-Haus, 2006), ISBN 3-926235-26-8, p. 84.
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